GM's trial program selling cars on eBay set to end

September 29, 2009
By KIMBERLY S. JOHNSON , AP Auto Writer

(AP) -- General Motors Co. said Tuesday that it is concluding its partnership with eBay Inc. in which the automaker used the auction site to sell new cars through California dealerships, as it shifts focus to broader, national marketing programs.

GM and eBay said the program was slated to end Sept. 30, and was not canceled for lack of participation. GM spokesman John McDonald deemed the program a "success" because it helped the Detroit-based company improve strategies to reach car buyers that typically don't consider GM products.

"We're taking what we learned from eBay and applying it to our digital and social marketing media marketing strategies," he said. "From our view, it was a success."

Through eBay's auto marketplace, car shoppers in California were able to negotiate a price with a dealer, or purchase the vehicle at a fixed price and pick it up at a dealership.

The eBay site received 1.5 million hits, or visits, producing 15,000 leads for dealers. About 227 California-based dealerships participated in the program. GM and eBay did not say how many cars were sold based on the program.

McDonald said that it GM would focus on its new, national marketing campaigns and its money-back guarantee program in which dissatisfied buyers can return their vehicles within 60 days.

For eBay, the end of the program doesn't mark an end to its relationship with GM or future plans to sell new cars from other automakers in a similar fashion.

"The fact that this program itself may not continue as a promotion is not necessarily (indicative of our relationship with GM)," said Rob Chesney, VP of eBay Motors.

Chesney said eBay may seek to develop similar programs with other automakers, but did not offer specifics.

Related Stories

(AP) -- As part of its turnaround plan, General Motors Corp. said Friday it plans to experiment with auctioning new cars on eBay, expanding on an existing partnership covering certified used vehicles on the online marketplace.

Recommended for you

Micro-grippers may be able to navigate unstructured environments and could help reduce risk during surgeries, according to a study published December 13, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Federico Ongaro from the ...

Cracking the German Enigma code is considered to be one of the decisive factors that hastened Allied victory in World War II. Starting with clues derived from espionage, computer scientists were able to work out the rules ...

How sensitive is the human sense of touch? Sensitive enough to feel the difference between surfaces that differ by just a single layer of molecules, a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego has shown.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers can now predict how much energy solar cells will produce at any location worldwide. Surprisingly, they identified that two types of solar cells (silicon and cadmium telluride) ...

Consumers across the world enjoy Greek yogurt for its taste, texture, and protein-packed punch. Reaching that perfect formula, however, generates large volumes of food waste in the form of liquid whey. Now researchers in ...

Computer scientists have built and successfully tested a tool designed to detect when websites are hacked by monitoring the activity of email accounts associated with them. The researchers were surprised to find that almost ...